Geoffrey Young

[from Geoffrey Young's The Riot Act, 2008; I first read Geoffrey Young's work at Ron Silliman's blog]

No Single Effort

No single effort captures the essence of the human condition. But the completion of any day's writing adds its particular brush with experience to the master list of competing versions, even if no one reads it for a thousand years.

Why?

Because the time is ripe. We are still green. I look in vain for adults. Nothing but kids on this watch. Six or seven feet tall. Hard to discipline. A good sign in growing boys? Tell me a myth I haven't heard.

The lake of the mind stores wetness. Drying up is our worst enemy. For a person in my shorts I can imagine nothing worse.

It takes a meadowlark in a field. It takes a futon in a loft.

How much time do we have. How much face. You know more than I do. Three chords worth. I've never seen such music.

Call it a self-knockout.

Will Prospero set us free?

A black line traps the image. We suffer people too much. Grainy landscape with noon train. Roll the credits.



Turning Pages

Benny "Kid" Peret fluttered
against the ropes
like a titmouse beating his wings in cream
while Emile Griffith the Donatello of the Hotel Champion

pummeled the Kid with smashed potatoes and fireball
jabs, and we leaped off the king-size bed
yelling "Stop it! Stop the fight! He's out on his feet"
to the referee who didn't see it

as Griffith's fists loosened the head
of the Kid from its spinal axis until
finally the leather that was shaping it
could have been fingers turning

pages of a windblown book
no one will ever read again.

Riot Act

Muddy Prints, Water Shine

You can pre-order my chapbook, Muddy Prints, Water Shine from Finishing Line Press. Free shipping until 03/28/08.

Dusie

Thank you DIY Poetry Publishing Collective for this link to Dusie issue 7, which contains 60 electronic chapbooks.

Fanny Howe

[the final section of "Forty Days" from Fanny Howe's The Lyrics, 2007]

29.

Call out.
Press nine.

I will hear some shift of gray in the air.
Will ingest the frost of its silence.

A six-foot bed
And a sprawler's sigh through the wall

Of this fifty-pound hotel
Occupied by the dropped.



Call out, no call back.

Fall fast forward without will
To the window.

The other world is pressed
Against the glass:

A kind of heaven, a known nothing.

Call out to the cone-opening light
To colors never seen before

But most familiar.



Call out of the grit in your tissue
Before your days are written

Or you will be too late for the answer.

Be really primitive.
A thin finger picture

Of nature undernurtured.

Like egg, parchment, glue and the breath of the artist.



Call come in at last
Immaterial

When or where
A message from that.

I will be packed into people
Against a strange tin.

Vehicles will glitter
And polyphony the interrupter

Will cut every sentence in half.

Call I won't call back.
Call up into the night.

"Knower, how is this voice different from the others?"

The Lyrics: Poems

Alice Friman

At 7 PM on Friday February 8 Alice Friman will read at the Second Presbyterian Church in Charleston for the Poetry Society of South Carolina.

The poem below was my knock-you-back introduction to Alice.

[from The Gettysburg Review, Summer 2004]

Waiting

Life isn't long enough
to learn the patience necessary.
Pitted against desire, what's so hot about
counting to ten? Think salmon — the fight,
the desperate fling
                           against the bear's
swipe and the knock-you-back water.
In the face of need, let's face it,
patience is luxury. Even Beauty,
sensible, yes, but come first thaw
she too is cruising for the hook.
No lure, no worm, no hand-tied fly
but whooped up already, ready to thrash
gasping in the bilge of any boat.
                                             One ogle,
one polished line, one invitation into
the tangoed dark, and there it is — the red
slam-dunk of the heart, that timpani
in the chest counting out
the clarinet's twiddle and each thin
thought of the violin, wanting only
the great drama it was tightened up for.
The big BIM BAM.
                         Listen, the heart
wants what it wants. There's no telling
it different. Look out the window.
The curtain rises, and stage left — see?
Spring enters singing forsythia, that aria
of yellow, that operatic bush.

Miroslav Holub

[from Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers edited by Charles Simic and Mark Strand, 1985]

Suffering [excerpt]

But I ask no questions,
       no one asks any questions,
Because it's all quite useless,
Experiments succeed and experiments fail,
Like everything else in this world,
       in which truth advances
       like some splendid silver bulldozer
       in the tumbling darkness

Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers

Ralph Waldo Emerson

[from Ralph Waldo Emerson's journal, July 21, 1837]

Courage consists in the conviction that they with whom you contend are no more than you. If we believed in the existence of strict individuals, natures, that is, not radically identical but unknown, immeasurable, we should never dare to fight.

Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836-1838: With Annotations

Dante Alighieri

[from Canto V of Dante Alighieri's Purgatorio, translated by Jean and Robert Hollander]

"Perché l'animo tuo tanto s'impiglia?"
disse 'l maestro, "che l'andare allenti?
che ti fa ciò che quivi si pispiglia?

Vien dientro a me, e lascia dir le genti:
sta come torre ferma, che no crolla
già mai la cima per soffiar di venti;

ché sempre l'omo in cui pensier rampolla
sovra pensier, da sé dilunga il segno,
perché la foga l'un de l'altro insolla."

Che potea io ridir, se non "Io vegno"?

—

'Is your mind so distracted,' asked the master,
'that you have slowed your pace?
Why do you care what they are whispering?

'Just follow me and let the people talk.
Be more like a sturdy tower
that does not tremble in the fiercest wind.

'For any man who lets one thought --
and then another -- take him over
will soon lose track of his first goal.'

What could I answer but 'I come?'

Purgatorio

Wislawa Szymborska

[from Wislawa Szymborska's Monologue of a Dog, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, 2006]

Puddles

I remember that childhood fear well,
I avoided puddles,
especially fresh ones, after showers.
One of them might be bottomless, after all,
even though it looks just like the rest.

I'll step and suddenly be swallowed whole,
I'll start rising downwards
then even deeper down
towards the reflected clouds
and maybe farther.

Then the puddle will dry up,
shut above me,
I'm trapped for good -- where --
with a shout that never made it to the surface.

Understanding came only later:
not all misadventures
fit within the world's laws
and even if they wanted to,
they couldn't happen.

Monologue of a Dog

Joseph Brodsky

[from Joseph Brodsky's Less Than One: Selected Essays, 1986]

art, especially poetry, differs from any other form of psychological activity precisely because in it everything -- form, content, and the very spirit of the work -- is picked out by ear. . . . verse meter is the equivalent of a certain psychological state, at times not of just one state but of several. The poet "picks" his way toward the spirit of a work by means of the meter.

The above by no means signifies intellectual irresponsibility. Exactly the opposite is the case: rational enterprise -- choice, selection -- is entrusted to hearing, or (putting it more clumsily but more accurately) is focused into hearing.

. . . it is the second, and not the first, line that shows where your poem is to go metrically. It also informs an experienced reader as to the identity of the author, i.e., whether he is American or British (an American second line, normally, is quite bold: it violates the preconceived music of the meter with its linguistic content; a Briton, normally, tends to sustain the tonal predictability of the second line, introducing his own diction only in the third, or, more likely, in the fourth line. Compare the tetrametric -- or even pentametric -- jobs of Thomas Hardy with E. A. Robinson, or better still, with Robert Frost). More importantly, though, the second line is the line that introduces the rhyme scheme.

. . . in a poem, you should try to reduce the number of adjectives to a minimum. So that if somebody covers your poem with a magic cloth that removes adjectives, the page will still be black enough because of nouns, adverbs, and verbs. When that cloth is little, your best friends are nouns. Also, never rhyme the same parts of speech. Nouns you can, verbs you shouldn't, and rhyming adjectives is taboo.

. . . Whenever you are going to use something pejorative, try to apply it to yourself to get the full measure of the word. Otherwise your criticism may amount simply to getting unpleasant things out of your system.

. . . A stanza, you see, is a self-generating device: the end of one spells the necessity of another. This necessity is first of all purely acoustical and, only then, didactical (although one shouldn't try to divorce them, especially for the sake of analysis). The danger here is that the preconceived music of a recurrent stanzaic pattern tends to dominate or even determine the content. And it's extremely hard for a poet to fight the dictates of the tune.

The eleven-line-long stanza of "September 1, 1939," is, as far as I can tell, Auden's own invention, and the irregularity of its rhyme pattern functions as an anti-fatigue device. Note that. All the same, the quantitative effect of an eleven-line-long stanza is such that the first thing on the writer's mind as he starts a new one is to escape from the musical predicament of the preceding lines.

Less Than One: Selected Essays

Marina Tsvetaeva

Joseph Brodsky's essay "Footnote to a Poem" discusses Marina Tsvetaeva's elegy for Rilke. This fine essay and others on Akmatova, Auden, and Montale, appear in Joseph Brodsky's Less Than One: Selected Essays, 1986.

The poem's been translated, but I don't have and haven't read a translation except for the short bits in Brodsky's essay. The poem is unbelievable in the original. No, I don't read Russian. I copied the poem's Russian text from this Web link and cannot attest to its accuracy. Try reading it aloud -- zlachnom -- / (Zlachnom -- zhvachnom) meste zychnom, meste zvuchnom -- do you need to know what that means?

Novogodnee

S Novym godom -- svetom -- kraem -- krovom!
Pervoe pis'mo tebe na novom
-- Nedorazumenie, chto zlachnom --
(Zlachnom -- zhvachnom) meste zychnom, meste zvuchnom
Kak Eolova pustaya bashnya.
Pervoe pis'mo tebe s vcherashnej,
Na kotoroj bez tebya iznoyus',
Rodiny, teper' uzhe s odnoj iz
Zvezd... Zakon othoda i otboya,
Po kotoromu lyubimaya lyuboyu
I nebyvsheyu iz nebyvaloj,
Rasskazat', kak pro tvoyu uznala?
Ne zemletryasen'e, ne lavina.
CHelovek voshel -- lyuboj -- (lyubimyj --
Ty.) -- Priskorbnejshee iz sobytij.
-- V Novostyah i v Dnyah.-- Stat'yu dadite?
-- Gde? -- V gorah. (Okno v elovyh vetkah.
Prostynya.) -- Ne vidite gazet ved'?
Tak stat'yu? -- Net.-- No...-- Proshu izbavit'.
Vsluh: trudna. Vnutr': ne hristoprodavec.
-- V sanatorii. (V rayu naЈmnom).
-- Den'? -- Vchera, pozavchera, ne pomnyu.
V Al'kazare budete? -- Ne budu.
Vsluh: sem'ya. Vnutr': vsЈ, no ne Iuda.

S nastupayushchim! (Rozhdalsya zavtra!) --
Rasskazat', chto sdelala uznav pro...?
Tes... Ogovorilas'. Po privychke.
ZHizn' i smert' davno beru v kavychki,
Kak zavedomo-pustye splЈty.
Nichego ne sdelala, no chto-to
Sdelalos', bez teni i bez eha
Delayushchee!
Teper' -- kak ehal?
Kak rvalos' i ne razorvalos' kak --
Serdce? Kak na rysakah orlovskih,
Ot orlov, skazal, ne otstayushchih,
Duh zahvatyvalo -- ili pushche?
Slashche? Ni vysot tomu, ni spuskov,
Na orlah letal zapravskih russkih --
Kto. Svyaz' krovnaya u nas s tem svetom:
Na Rusi byval -- tot svet na etom
Zrel. Nalazhennaya perebezhka!
ZHizn' i smert' proiznoshu s usmeshkoj
Skrytoyu -- svoej eya kosnesh'sya!
ZHizn' i smert' proiznoshu so snoskoj,
Zvezdochkoyu (noch', kotoroj chayu:
Vmesto mozgovogo polushar'ya --
Zvezdnoe!)
Ne pozabyt' by, drug moj,
Sleduyushchego: chto esli bukvy
Russkie poshli vzamen nemeckih --
To ne potomu, chto nynche, deskat',
VsЈ sojdet, chto mertvyj (nishchij) vsЈ s®est
Ne smorgnet! -- a potomu chto tot svet,
Nash,-- trinadcati, v Novodevich'em
Ponyala: ne bez-, a vse-yazychen.

Vot i sprashivayu ne bez grusti:
Uzh ne sprashivaesh', kak po-russki
Nest? Edinstvennaya i vse gnezda
Pokryvayushchaya rifma: zvezdy.

Otvlekayus'? No takoj i veshchi
Ne najdetsya -- ot tebya otvlech'sya.
Kazhdyj pomysel, lyuboj, Du Lieber,
Slog v tebya vedet -- o chem by ni byl
Tolk (pust' russkogo rodnej nemeckij
Mne, vseh angel'skij rodnej!) -- kak mesta
Nest', gde net tebya, net est': mogila.
VsЈ kak ne bylo i vsЈ kak bylo,
-- Neuzheli obo mne nichut' ne? --
Okruzhen'e, Rajner, samochuvstv'e?
Nastoyatel'no, vsenepremenno --
Pervoe videnie vselennoj
(Podrazumevaetsya, poeta
V onoj) i poslednee -- planety,
Raz tol'ko tebe i dannoj -- v celom!
Ne poeta s prahom, duha s telom,
(Obosobit' -- oskorbit' oboih)
A tebya s toboj, tebya s toboyu zh,
-- Byt' Zevesovym ne znachit luchshim --
Kastora -- tebya s toboj -- Polluksom,
Mramora -- tebya s toboyu, travkoj,
Ne razluku i ne vstrechu -- stavku
Ochnuyu: i vstrechu i razluku
Pervuyu.
Na sobstvennuyu ruku
Kak glyadel (na sled -- na nej -- chernil'nyj)
So svoej stol'ko-to (skol'ko?) mil'noj
Beskonechnoj ibo beznachal'noj
Vysoty nad urovnem hrustal'nym
Sredizemnogo -- i prochih blyudec.
VsЈ kak ne bylo i vsЈ kak budet
I so mnoyu za koncom predmest'ya.
VsЈ kak ne bylo i vsЈ kak est' uzh
-- CHto' spisavshemusya do nedel'ki
Lishnej! -- i kuda zh eshche glyadet'-to,
Prioblokotyas' na obod lozhi,
S etogo -- kak ne na tot, s togo zhe
Kak ne na mnogostradal'nyj etot.
V Bellevyu zhivu. Iz gnezd i vetok
Gorodok. Pereglyanuvshis' s gidom:
Bellevyu. Ostrog s prekrasnym vidom
Na Parizh -- chertog himery gall'skoj --
Na Parizh -- i na nemnozhko dal'she...
Prioblokotyas' na alyj obod
Kak tebe smeshny (komu) "dolzhno byt'",
(Mne zh) dolzhny byt', s vysoty bez mery,
Nashi Bellevyu i Bel'vedery!

Perebrasyvayus'. CHastnost'. Srochnost'.
Novyj God v dveryah. Za chto, s kem choknus'
CHerez stol? CHem? Vmesto peny -- vaty
Klok. Zachem? Nu, b'et -- a pri chem ya tut?
CHto mne delat' v novogodnem shume
S etoj vnutrenneyu rifmoj: Rajner -- umer.
Esli ty, takoe oko smerklos',
Znachit, zhizn' ne zhizn' est', smert' ne smert' est'.
Znachit -- tmitsya, dopojmu pri vstreche! --
Net ni zhizni, net ni smerti,-- tret'e,
Novoe. I za nego (solomoj
Zasteliv sed'moj -- dvadcat' shestomu
Othodyashchemu -- kakoe schast'e
Toboj konchit'sya, toboj nachat'sya!)
CHerez stol, neobozrimyj okom,
Budu chokat'sya s toboyu tihim chokom
Stkla o stklo? Net -- ne kabackim ihnim:
YA o ty, sliyas' dayushchih rifmu:
Tret'e.
CHerez stol glyazhu na krest tvoj.
Skol'ko mest -- zagorodnyh, i mesta
Za gorodom! i komu zhe mashet
Kak ne nam -- kust? Mest -- imenno nashih
I nich'ih drugih! Ves' list! Vsya hvoya!
Mest tvoih so mnoj (tvoih s toboyu).
(CHto s toboyu by i na massovku --
Govorit'?) chto -- mest! a mesyacov-to!
A nedel'! A dozhdevyh predmestij
Bez lyudej! A utr! A vsego vmeste
I ne nachatogo solov'yami!

Verno ploho vizhu, ibo v yame,
Verno luchshe vidish', ibo svyshe:
Nichego u nas s toboj ne vyshlo.
Do togo, tak chisto i tak prosto
Nichego, tak po plechu i rostu
Nam -- chto i perechislyat' ne nado.
Nichego, krome -- ne zhdi iz ryadu
Vyhodyashchego (neprav iz takta
Vyhodyashchij!) -- a v kakoj by, kak by
Ryad voshedshego?
Pripev izvechnyj:
Nichego hot' chem-nibud' na nechto
CHto-nibud' -- hot' izdali by -- ten' hot'
Teni! Nichego, chto: chas tot, den' tot,
Dom tot -- dazhe smertniku v kolodkah
Pamyat'yu darovannoe: rot tot!
Ili slishkom razbiralis' v sredstvah?
Iz vsego togo odin lish' svet tot
Nash byl, kak my sami tol'ko otsvet
Nas,-- vzamen vsego sego -- ves' tot svet!

S nezastroennejshej iz okrain --
S novym mestom, Rajner, svetom, Rajner!
S dokazuemosti mysom krajnim --
S novym okom, Rajner, sluhom, Rajner!

VsЈ tebe pomehoj
Bylo: strast' i drug.
S novym zvukom, |ho!
S novym ehom, Zvuk!

Skol'ko raz na shkol'nom taburete:
CHto za gory tam? Kakie reki?
Horoshi landshafty bez turistov?
Ne oshiblas', Rajner -- raj -- goristyj,
Grozovoj? Ne prityazanij vdov'ih --
Ne odin ved' raj, nad nim drugoj ved'
Raj? Terrasami? Suzhu po Tatram --
Raj ne mozhet ne amfiteatrom
Byt'. (A zanaves nad kem-to spushchen...)
Ne oshiblas', Rajner, Bog -- rastushchij
Baobab? Ne Zolotoj Lyudovik --
Ne odin ved' Bog? Nad nim drugoj ved'
Bog?
Kak pishetsya na novom meste?
Vprochem est' ty -- est' stih: sam i est' ty
Stih! Kak pishetsya v horoshej zhisti
Bez stola dlya loktya, lba dlya kisti
(Gorsti).
-- Vestochku, privychnym shifrom!
Rajner, raduesh'sya novym rifmam?
Ibo pravil'no tolkuya slovo
Rifma -- chto -- kak ne -- celyj ryad novyh
Rifm -- Smert'?
Nekuda: yazyk izuchen.
Celyj ryad znachenij i sozvuchij
Novyh.
-- Do svidan'ya! Do znakomstva!
Svidimsya -- ne znayu, no -- spoemsya.
S mne-samoj nevedomoj zemleyu --
S celym morem, Rajner, s celoj mnoyu!

Ne raz®ehat'sya -- cherkni zarane.
S novym zvukonachertan'em, Rajner!
V nebe lestnica, po nej s Darami...
S novym rukopolozhen'em, Rajner!

CHtob ne zalili, derzhu ladon'yu.--
Poverh Rony i poverh Rarogn'a,
Poverh yavnoj i sploshnoj razluki
Rajneru -- Mariya -- Ril'ke -- v ruki.

Bellevue
7 fevralya 1927

Less Than One: Selected Essays

Julio Cortazar

[from Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers edited by Charles Simic and Mark Strand, 1985]

The Lines of the Hand

From a letter thrown on the table a line comes which runs across the pine plank and descends by one of the legs. Just watch, you see that the line continues across the parquet floor, climbs the wall and enters a reproduction of a Boucher painting, sketches the shoulder of a woman reclining on a divan, and finally gets out of the room via the roof and climbs down the chain of lightning rods to the street. Here it is difficult to follow it because of the transit system, but by close attention you can catch it climbing the wheel of a bus parked at the corner, which carries it as far as the docks. It gets off there down the seam on the shiny nylon stocking of the blondest passenger, enters the hostile territory of the customs sheds, leaps and squirms and zigzags its way to the largest dock, and there (but it's difficult to see, only the rats follow it to clamber aboard) it climbs onto the ship with the engines rumbling, crosses the planks of the first-class deck, clears the major hatch with difficulty, and in a cabin where an unhappy man is drinking cognac, and hears the parting whistle, it climbs the trouser seam, across the knitted vest, slips back to the elbow, and with a final push finds shelter in the palm of the right hand, which is just beginning to close around the butt of a revolver.

Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers

Robert Duncan

[from Robert Duncan's "From a Notebook," The Poetics of the New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen and Warren Tallman, 1973]

I am willing to pursue this art in search of itself, because for the time I have shaken off the insistent hounds of the critical posse. I have returned to the privacy of my craft and find that if I am my own judge I will allow the full play. As far as I can go gives me life again on the page.

. . . I have not time to solicit the good opinion of those who feel chummy: I have no time for the possibilities of success. Each fulfillment precludes it.

And a sense of perspective again -- that making history, even writing a great poem, is out of the way. I don't want it. When I turn to my own vein, I see it is all very questionable -- but the full joy of dancing there is enough.

The Poetics of the New American Poetry

Charles Olson

[from Charles Olson's essay "Projective Verse," 1950]

Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the "subject" and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use.

It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way.

Collected Prose

Gertrude Stein

[from Gertrude Stein's Narration, 1935]

Let's make our flour meal and meat in Georgia.

Is that prose or poetry and why.

Let's make our flour meal and meat in Georgia.

This is a sign I read as we rode on a train from Atlanta to Birmingham and I wondered then and am still wondering is it poetry or is it prose . . .

Let's make our flour meal and meat in Georgia.

Well believe it or not it is very difficult to know whether that is prose or poetry and does it really make any difference if you do or not know. This.

And so things moving perhaps perhaps moving in any direction, names being not existing because anybody can know what any body else is talking about without any name being mentioning, without any belief in any name being existing, I have just been trying to write the history of some one if his name had not been the name he had and I have called it Four in America and it is very interesting. You can slowly change any one by their name changing to any other name, and so slowly just knowing the name of anything and so making any one remember about such a thing the thing whose name its name anybody has happened to be mentioning cannot really very much interest any one, not really very much, and so perhaps narrative and poetry and prose have all come where they do not have to be considered as being there. Perhaps not I very much really very much think perhaps not, and that may make one thing or anything or everything say itself in a different way yes in a different way, who shall say, and all this now and always later we will come to say, perhaps yes, perhaps no, no and yes are still nice words, yes I guess I still will believe that I will.

You will perhaps say no and yes perhaps yes.

Narration, Four Lectures

Hart Crane

[the beginning of a letter sent in 1926 by Hart Crane to Harriet Monroe, from The Poetics of the New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen and Warren Tallman, 1973]

Your good nature and manifest interest in writing me about the obscurities apparent in my Melville poem certainly prompt a wish to clarify my intentions in that poem as much as possible. But I realize that my explanations will not be very convincing. For a paraphrase is generally a poor substitute for any organized conception that one has fancied he has put into the more essentialized form of the poem itself.

At any rate, and though I imagine us to have considerable differences of opinion regarding the relationship of poetic metaphor to ordinary logic (I judge this from the angle of approach you use toward portions of the poem), I hope my answers will not be taken as a defense of merely certain faulty lines. I am really much more interested in certain theories of metaphor and technique involved generally in poetics, than I am concerned in vindicating any particular perpetrations of my own.

My poem may well be elliptical and actually obscure in the ordering of its content, but in your criticism of this very possible deficiency you have stated your objections in terms that allow me, at least for the moment, the privilege of claiming your ideas and ideals as theoretically, at least, quite outside the issues of my own aspirations. To put it more plainly, as a poet I may very possibly be more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and perceptions involved in the poem.

This may sound as though I merely fancied juggling words and images until I found something novel, or esoteric; but the process is much more predetermined and objectified than that. The nuances of feeling and observation in a poem may well call for certain liberties which you claim the poet has no right to take. I am simply making the claim that the poet does have that authority, and that to deny it is to limit the scope of the medium so considerably as to outlaw some of the richest genius of the past.

The Poetics of the New American Poetry

Laura Riding (via Susan M. Schultz)

[from Susan M. Schultz's A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, 2005]

In response to such misinterpretations, Riding attempts to create a wedge between the poem and its interpreters. As she writes in Anarchism Is Not Enough (1928), "Poetry is . . . not concentrated on an audience but on itself." The poem, like a woman, is; it cannot be changed by its interpreter. This is the truth of the matter, for a poet obsessed with capital-T Truth. As we shall see, however, this wedge also creates the option -- or necessity -- of Riding's conceiving of silence as better than language. Silence, at least, cannot be so easily interpreted. In "Being a Woman," Riding describes woman as being like the moon, which though it has been interpreted by men, refuses to become that interpretation: "woman does not become what man variously 'makes' of her. So when a certain imaginative interpretation is put upon the moon's movements and prevails as a convention by which conveniently to describe the moon, the moon and its movements do not adapt itself to the interpretation; a new lunar manifestation would change the interpretation, but no new idea about the moon changes the moon."

A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (Modern & Contemporary Poetics)

Jean Valentine

[from Jean Valentine's Little Boat, 2007]

The Harrowing

The worn hands
spines         feet
                                 Even he
whose blank hand I held on to
for dear life
                                 phantom limb


On your sidewalk
walking past your café

the piano was being tuned, hard,
trying it, one note at a time

trying, walking outside of time
— was that the night —          & space


Blessed are those
who break off from separateness

theirs is wild
heaven.

Little Boat (Wesleyan Poetry)

Gaston Bachelard

[from Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places, 1994]

Like friendship, words sometimes swell, at the dreamer's will, in the loop of a syllable. While in other words, everything is calm, tight. . . . Words -- I often imagine this -- are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in "foreign commerce," on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves -- this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low, is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together.

The Poetics of Space

Francis Ponge

[Francis Ponge from Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, edited by Mark Strand and Charles Simic, 1976]

Water [excerpt, Beth Archer, tr.]

LIQUID, by definition, is
that which chooses to obey gravity
rather than maintain its form, which rejects all
form in order to obey gravity --
and which loses all dignity because of that
obsession, that pathological anxiety.
Because of that vice --
which makes it fast, flowing,
or stagnant, formless or fearsome, formless and
fearsome, piercingly fearsome in cases:
devious, filtering, winding --
one can do anything one
wants with it, even lead water
through pipes to make it spout out vertically,
so as to enjoy the way
it collapses in droplets:
a real slave.


The Pebble [excerpt, Cid Corman, tr.]

The great wheel of stone seems to us
practically immobile
and, even
theoretically we can understand
only a part of
the phase of its very slow
disintegration.

So much so that contrary to
common opinion which holds
it in the eyes of man as a symbol of
endurance and impassivity,
you can say in fact that
stone,
never re-forming in nature, is
in reality the only thing in it that dies,
constantly.

[my line endings]

Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers

Raymond Carver

An unsigned New Yorker blurb on the Carver/Lish relationship. More interesting than the blurb are the Primary Sources listed underneath Carver's photo -- Carver's story, Lish's edits, samples of Carver/Lish correspondence.

W. G. Sebald

[W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, translated by Michael Hulse, 1998]

those who go in pursuit of herring have always relied on their traditional knowledge, which draws upon legend, and is based on their own observation of facts such as the tendency of the fish, swimming in even, wedge-shaped formations, to reflect a pulsating glow skyward when the sunlight falls at a particular angle. One dependable sign that herring present is said to be myriads of scales floating on the surface of the water, shimmering like tiny silver tiles by day and sometimes at dusk resembling ashes or snow. . . .

An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that, when dead, it begins to glow; this property, which resembles phosphorescence and is yet altogether different, peaks a few days after death and then ebbs away as the fish decays. For a long time no one could account for this glowing of the lifeless herring, and indeed I believe that it still remains unexplained. Around 1870, when projects for the total illumination of our cities were everywhere afoot, two English scientists with the apt names of Herrington and Lightbown investigated the unusual phenomenon in the hope that the luminous substance exuded by dead herrings would lead to a formula for an organic source of light that had the capacity to regenerate itself. The failure of this artificial light, constituted no more than a negligible setback in the relentless conquest of darkness. . . .

I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow.

The Rings of Saturn

John Ashbery

"Retro"

Louise Gluck

"Nostos"

Horace

[from David Ferry's The Odes of Horace, 1997]

ii.3 To Dellius

When things are bad, be steady in your mind;
     Dellius, don't be
Too unrestrainedly joyful in good fortune.
     You are going to die.

It doesn't matter at all whether you spend
     Your days and nights in sorrow,
Or, on the other hand, in holiday pleasure,
     Drinking Falernian wine

Of an excellent vintage year, on the river bank.
     Why is it, do you suppose,
That the dark branches of those tall pines and those
     Poplars' silvery leafy

Branches love to join, coming together,
     Creating a welcoming shade?
Haven't you noticed how in the quiet river
     The current shows signs of hurry,

Urging itself to go forward, going somewhere,
     Making its purposeful way?
By all means tell your servants to bring you wine,
     Perfumes, and the utterly lovely

Too briefly blossoming flowers of the villa garden;
     Yes, of course, while youth,
And circumstance, and the black threads of the Sisters
     Suffer this to be so.

You're going to have to yield those upland pastures,
     The ones you bought just lately;
You're going to yield the townhouse, and the villa,
     The country place whose margin

The Tiber washes as it moves along.
     Heirs will possess all that
Which you have gathered. It does not matter at all
     If you are rich, with kings

Forefathers of your pride; no matter; or poor,
     Fatherless under the sky.
You will be sacrificed to Orcus without pity.
     All of us together

Are being gathered; the lot of each of us
     Is in the shaking urn
With all the other lots, and like the others
     Sooner or later our lot

Will fall out from the urn; and so we are chosen to take
     Our place in that dark boat,
In that dark boat, that bears us all away
     From here to where no one comes back from ever.

The Odes of Horace: Bilingual Edition

Michael Ondaatje

[from Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero, 2007]

We returned to the car and drove towards Dému.

All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behaviour of the other. It's like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle's form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

There was now not a single lit streetlamp in the villages we passed, just our headlights veering and sweeping along the two-lane roads. We were alone in the world, in nameless and unseen country. I love such journeying at night. You have most of your life strapped to your back. Music on the radio comes faint and intermittent. You are wordless at last. Your friend's hand on your knee to make sure you are not drifting away. The black hedges coax you on.

Divisadero

Horace

[from David Ferry's The Odes of Horace, 1997]

i.3 Virgil's Journey to Greece

May Venus goddess of Cyprus and may the brothers
Castor and Pollux, the shining stars, the calmers,
Guard you, O ship, and be the light of guidance;
May the father of the winds restrain all winds
Except the gentle one that favors this journey.
Bring Virgil, your charge, the other half of my heart,
Safely to the place where he is going.

The breast of the man who was the first to dare
To go out in a little boat upon the waters
Must have been made of oak and triple bronze,
Fearing neither the sudden African squall
Contending with the North Wind, nor the storms
The Hyades threaten, nor what the South Wind, Notus,
Who rules the Adriatic, is capable of.

What way of dying could that man have feared
Who dared to be the first to look upon
The swimming monsters, the turbulent waters and
The dreadful cliffs of Acroceraunia?
The purpose of the god who separated
One land from another land was thwarted
If impious men could nevertheless set out

To cross the waters forbidden to them to cross.
Audacious at trying out everything, men rush
Headlong into the things that have been forbidden.
Guileful Prometheus audaciously by fraud
Brought fire down to the human race and thus
Brought fever down upon us and disease,
And death that once was slow to come came sooner.

Audacious Daedalus, wearing forbidden wings,
Tried out the empty air. And Hercules
Went down to the Underworld, broke in and entered.
No hill's too steep for men to try to climb;
Men even try out getting up to Heaven.
Is it any wonder, then, that Jupiter rages,
Hurling down lightning, shaking the sky with thunder?

The Odes of Horace: Bilingual Edition

Valerio Magrelli

[from New Italian Poets edited by Dana Gioia and Michael Palma, 1991; Valerio Magrelli's untitled poem translated by Dana Gioia]

Ten poems written in one month
is not much even if this one
will become the eleventh.
Not even the subjects differ greatly
rather there is a single subject
whose subject is the subject, just like now.
This is to say how much
stays off the page,
knocks but cannot enter
nor even has to. Writing
is not a mirror, rather
the rough-surfaced glass of a shower
on which the body falls to pieces
and only its shadow shows through
indistinct but real.
And the one who washes reveals nothing
but his own gestures.
Therefore what purpose is there
in looking beyond the watermark
in case I am a counterfeiter
and the watermark alone is my work?

New Italian Poets

Joe Wenderoth

"Writer" by Joe Wenderoth

David Shapiro

[from David Shapiro's House (Blown Apart), 1988]

House (Blown Apart)

I can see the traces of old work
Embedded in this page, like your bed
Within a bed. My old desire to live!
My new desire to understand material, raw
Material as if you were a house without windows
A red stain. Gold becomes cardboard.
The earth grows rare and cheap as a street.
Higher up a bird of prey affectionate in bright grey
             travels without purpose.
I beg you to speak with a recognizable accent
As the roof bashed in for acoustics
Already moans. What is not a model
Is blown to bits in this mature breeze.
If students visit for signs
Or signatures we would discuss traces.
             We would examine each other for doubts.
Old work we might parody as an homage
Losing after all the very idea of parody.
Traces of this morning's work are embedded in this page.

David Shapiro: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2006

Fernando Pessoa

[from Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, tr. Richard Zenith, 2001]

She holds Spring against her breast and stares at me with sad eyes. Her smile shines, because the paper's glossy, and her cheeks are red. The sky behind her is the colour of light blue cloth. She has a sculpted, almost tiny mouth, and above its postcard expression her eyes keep staring at me with an enormous sorrow. The arm holding the flowers reminds me of someone else's. Her dress or blouse has a low neck that reveals one shoulder. Her eyes are genuinely sad: they stare at me from the depth of the lithographic reality with a truth of some sort. She came with Spring. Her eyes are large, but that's not what makes them sad. I tear myself from the window with violent steps. I cross the street and turn around with impotent indignation. She still holds the Spring she was given, and her eyes are sad like all the things in life I've missed out on. Seen from a distance, the lithograph turns out to be more colourful. The figure's hair is tied at the top by a pinker than pink ribbon; I hadn't noticed. In human eyes, even in lithographic ones, there's something terrible: the inevitable warning of consciousness, the silent shout that there's a soul there. With a huge effort I pull out of the sleep in which I was steeped, and like a dog I shake off the drops of dark fog. Oblivious to my departure, as if bidding farewell to something else, those sad eyes of the whole of life -- of this metaphysical lithograph that we observe from a distance -- stare at me as if I knew something of God. The print, which has a calendar at the bottom, is framed above and below by two flatly curved, badly painted black strips. Within these upper and lower limits, above 1929 and an outmoded calligraphic vignette adorning the inevitable 1st of January, the sad eyes ironically smile at me.

The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Classics)

George Oppen

[from George Oppen's Collected Poems, 2002]

The Whirl Wind Must

for the huge
events are the       symbols

of loneliness (a country

poem of the feminine) and children's

trinkets in the gravel
of the driveways the warm

blood flows
in her the hot

river in the drama
of things caught
in the face

of things village
things long

ago a wind destroyed

shelter       shelter more lonely
than suns

astray over earth music
in the dark music

in the bare light suddenly I saw
thru Carol's eyes the little road leading
to her house the trampled

countries of the driveways to face
the silence of the pebbles the whirl wind must

have scattered under the sun the scattered

words that we can muster where once
were the grand stairways

of sea captains       language

in the roads speech

in the gravel the worn
tongues of the villages

New Collected Poems

Larry Levis

Thank you Blackbird for reprinting this Larry Levis poem:

1974: My Story in a Late Style of Fire

Denise Levertov

Woman Alone

When she cannot be sure
which of two lovers it was with whom she felt
this or that moment of pleasure, of something fiery
streaking from head to heels, the way the white
flame of a cascade streaks a mountainside
seen from a car across a valley, the car
changing gear, skirting a precipice,
climbing . . .
When she can sit or walk for hours after a movie
talking earnestly and with bursts of laughter
with friends, without worrying
that it's late, dinner at midnight, her time
spent without counting the change . . .
When half her bed is covered with books
and no one is kept awake by the reading light
and she disconnects the phone, to sleep till noon . . .
Then
selfpity dries up, a joy
untainted by guilt lifts her.
She has fears, but not about loneliness;
fears about how to deal with the aging
of her body -- how to deal
with photographs and the mirror. She feels
so much younger and more beautiful
than she looks.
                   At her happiest
-- or even in the midst of
some less than joyful hour, sweating
patiently through a heatwave in the city
or hearing the sparrows at daybreak, dully gray,
toneless, the sound of fatigue --
a kind of sober euphoria makes her believe
in her future as an old woman, a wanderer,
seamed and brown,
little luxuries of the middle of life all gone,
watching cities and rivers, people and mountains,
without being watched; not grim nor sad,
an old winedrinking woman, who knows
the old roads, grass-grown, and laughs to herself . . .
She knows it can't be:
that's Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby from The Water Babies,
no one can walk in the world any more,
a world of fumes and decibels.
But she thinks maybe
she could get to be tough and wise, some way,
anyway. Now at least
she is past the time of mourning,
now she can say without shame or deceit,
O blessed Solitude.

The Selected Poems of Denise Levertov

Dante

[from Dante's Convivio, tr. Ralph Mannheim]

Canzone, I think there will be few
who wholly understand your thought,
so strong and arduous is your utterance.
Therefore if by chance it happen
that you should meet with persons
who seem not to have seized it fully,
I pray you to take comfort,
my cherished poem, and to say:
"Consider at least how beautiful I am!"

Michael Burkard

[from The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review, edited by Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, and Arthur Vogelsang, 2000]

The Dogs on the Cliffs

They are there
after having long departed
from their memory, and whether there is any memory
of a master is hard to say, for they were
born into an island
which was poor, could not support the birth of dogs
except with the whiteness of the tourists'
faces, a whiteness like the wallets
and purses, the loose change of the lives
which brought them and their own memories to this island,
injury after jury.

The jury on the island says this:
the dogs may roam each summer
til it is obvious they are a menace,
chickens attacked, an occasional tourist
attacked, lingering now in small
pathetic packs. And thus they are herded
to the sea from the cliffs above,
enticed perhaps by some ice memory
(surely the local islanders don't entice them fully
with a little meat, are they that hungry?)

— an ice memory of the dogs of the year before,
and the fall before that, in the month of September,
upon an island which despises animals anyway —

and the dogs are brought to the cliffs and herded off.
To the sea. To the rocks and the sea below.
It is a long drop, even for a dog.

*

I did not so much live upon this island
as hear this story, more vividly told, with a particular
dog which followed a particular man — the dog even did a double
take one summer — when the man reappeared on Eos after departing
for a month to Athens — and the dog followed the double take —
just seeing the face twice — with following.

So the story is not mine, but I feared the man would never tell it —
though versions of stories like this must abound.

I can hear the stories on the cliffs,
I can hear the lamps wailing sometime
much later in the winter, in winter
when the animals are all dead, all of them, all
the past times down below
near the rocks off Eos.

Now the ice memory wakes: the jury reports
in a different dream
that the town and the villas are sold out
already for still another summer,
another history for history,
another past
for past.

Today, after only
glancing
at the morning paper

I thought of that phrase
history repeating itself,

thought if history repeats itself
it is still the same history,
more repetition, no
history

because it is the same history
the same hysteria
which could include even me
again.

The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review

Susan M. Schultz

[from Susan M. Schultz's A Poetics of Impasse in Modoern and Contemporary American Poetry, 2005]

What if we begin our discussion not
From the point of "how do we start writing, given that it's difficult?"
But that of "why is it that we are having such difficulty writing,
And how is it that we can meaningfully begin to write about subjects
That are not easy to tackle?" At the level of the beginning writer,
Perhaps it's best simply to set pen or pixel to paper and scribble,
But for any serious writer, the question of block is not simply
A technical, or even a psychological, problem, but one that
Leads us to consider the larger forces that inform our writing,
Or our lack of it. The notion that any writing, however private,
Is "free," while it may result in words on paper, does not ask
The hard questions about "freedom" (or any such abstract noun/
Concept) that need to be addressed before or during our hoped-for
Move from writer's block to writing practice. What Goldberg ignores
Is the content of the block, even as she offers remedies
For the block's effects. Get at that content, my argument goes,
And the reason behind the block becomes the content
Of the writing that follows; at the least, writing resumes
At the moment one recognizes why it has stopped in the first
Place, and the content of that writing inscribes both reason
And release, is not perhaps liberation but a means to elucidate
Ways which are implicated in the larger structures
That silence us.

A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (Modern & Contemporary Poetics)

Sarah Lindsay

Sarah Lindsay's "Cheese Penguin," text and audio provided by From the Fishouse; originally published in Primate Behavior, 1997

Primate Behavior: Poems (Grove Press Poetry Series)

Mark Doty

If you know me, you know I don't love dogs. Dogs scare me, even the dogs I know and like scare me, so I probably wouldn't have read Mark Doty's book Dog Years except that when I bought my Kindle, this was the only book by a great living poet that I could find in the Kindle catalog. I downloaded a sample and recognized the marvelous Doty voice -- it's prose, not poetry -- so I clicked on the "Buy" button and waited for the right moment, which turned out to be yesterday's Atlanta to Los Angeles flight.

This is the first book I've read straight through on the Kindle, and believe me, the Kindle is a reading joy. I wish all the books I want to read were on the Kindle. They're not, so for now I'm buying the dead guys -- Dante, Milton, Pope. And Pullman (need to read the book before I see the movie).

Dog Years is a GREAT book. Read it.

Dog Years

Herbert Mason's Gilgamesh

[from Herbert Mason's Gilgamesh, 2003]

All that is left to one who grieves
Is convalescence. No change of heart or spiritual
Conversion, for the heart has changed
And the soul has been converted
To a thing that sees
How much it costs to lose a friend it loved.
It has grown past conversion to a world
Few enter without tasting loss
In which one spends a long time waiting
For something to move one to proceed.
It is that inner atmosphere that has
An unfamiliar gravity or none at all
Where words are flung out in the air but stay
Motionless without an answer,
Hovering about one's lips
Or arguing back to haunt
The memory with what one failed to say,
Until one learns acceptance of the silence
Amidst the new debris
Or turns again to grief
As the only source of privacy,
Alone with someone loved.
It could go on for years and years,
And has, for centuries,
For being human holds a special grief
Of privacy within the universe
That yearns and waits to be retouched
By someone who can take away
The memory of death.

[the earliest versions of Gilgamesh are dated 2150-2000 BC]

Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative

Willem de Kooning

[from a Michael Sonnabend interview with Willem de Kooning, 1959]

When I'm falling, I am doing all right. And when I am slipping, I say, "Hey, this is very interesting." It is when I am standing upright that bothers me. I'm not doing so good. I'm stiff, you know. . . . As a matter of fact, I'm really slipping most of the time into that glimpse. That is a wonderful sensation, I realize right now, to slip into this glimpse. I'm like a slipping glimpser.

self-publish through Kindle

Rick Aristotle Munarriz at Motley Fool

James Elkins

[from James Elkins's The Object Stares Back, 1996]

The abstract machine of faciality is rooted in the body, and parts of it are repeated, strewn across the body's surface. The anus, the urethra, and the vagina were once called the "other face": an appropriate name for mock eyes, noses, and mouths. The armpits are blind, failed faces, and the navel is a partial face.

The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing

Henry Noel

[Henry Noel, 16th century poet]

Gaze Not on Swans

Gaze not on swans in whose soft breast
A full hatcht beauty seems to rest,
Nor snow which falling from the sky
Hovers in its virginity.

Gaze not on roses though new blown
Grac'd with a fresh complexion,
Nor lilly which no subtle bee
Hath rob'd by kissing chemistry.

Gaze not on that pure milky way
Where night vies splendour with the day,
Nor pearls whose silver walls confine
The riches of an Indian mine:

For if my emperesse appears
Swans moultring dy, snow melts to tears,
Roses do blush and hang their heads
Pale lillyes shrink into their beds;

The milky way rides past to shrowd
Its baffled glory in a clowd,
And pearls do climb unto her eare
To hang themselves for envy there.

So have I seene stars big with light,
Proud lanthorns to the moone-ey'd night,
Which when Sol's rays were once display'd
Sunk in their sockets and decay'd.

Neko Case

in Poetry

17th century view on rape

[from Kent R. Lehnhof's essay, “‘Impregn’d with Reason’: Eve’s Aural Conception in Paradise Lost.” Milton Studies 41 (2002)]

Relying upon such classical authorities as Galen and Aristotle, the early moderns asserted the existence of a female seed analogous to the male semen. Although the female seed was believed to be weaker and less pure than the male seed, it was nevertheless considered vital for conception. Conception, it was thought, could only occur if both the male and the female seeds were discharged during the sexual encounter. Because they believed that a female only emits her seed upon attaining orgasm, the early moderns insisted that conception could only come about if a woman enjoyed the sexual act. Thus, conception came to constitute concrete proof that a woman acted as a desiring, consenting participant in any given episode of intercourse. This putative connection is codified in Renaissance rape laws. As Sir Henry Finch professes in the enormously influential Law or a discourse thereof (1627): "Rape is the carnal abusing of a woman against her will. But if she conceives upon any carnal abusing of her, that is no rape, for she cannot conceive unless she consent." Richard Burns reiterates the idea in his guide for English magistrates, citing classical authorities to establish that "a woman can not conceive unless she doth consent." According to Thomas Laqueur, the belief that pregnancy proves complicity was so entrenched in English society that its physiological basis was not even questioned until the second half of the eighteenth or the first half of the nineteenth century.

Ray McManus

The Fall 2007 issue of The South Carolina Review includes my review of Ray McManus's fine book of poetry, Driving through the Country before You Are Born.

Muffets

[from Campbell, Mary Baine. “Busy Bees: Utopia, Dystopia, and the Very Small.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36:3 (2006) 619-642]

Thomas Muffet (whose daughter Patience famously sat on a tuffet), as translated from his Theatrum Insectorum in Topsell’s Historie of Four-Footed Beasts:

To conclude this Section you see that Bees (creatures without reason) have not only providence and foresight, joined with art and industrie, perfect order and discipline in their government, being naturally loyal, valiant, and magnanimous, and abhorring as well rebellion and treason, as cowardice and sloth, all which plainly shew that nature in Bees laying down such a pattern should not only be imitated but surpassed by men, lest they be reproved by these unreasonable creatures.

Fernando Pessoa

[from Poems of Fernando Pessoa translated by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown]

Autopsychography

The poet is a faker. He
Fakes it so completely,
He even fakes he's suffering
The pain he's really feeling.

And they who read his writing
Fully feel while reading
Not that pain of his that's double,
But theirs, completely fictional.

So on its tracks goes round and round,
To entertain the reason,
That wound-up little train
We call the heart of man.

Friedrich Nietzsche

[from Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil]

He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself thereby, as a despiser.

W. H. Auden

[from W. H. Auden's The Dyer's Hand, 1962]

A society which was really like a good poem, embodying the aesthetic virtues of beauty, order, economy and subordination of detail to the whole, would be a nightmare of horror for, given the historical reality of actual men, such a society could only come into being through selective breeding, extermination of the physically and mentally unfit, absolute obedience to its Director, and a large slave class kept out of sight in cellars.

Vice versa, a poem which was really like a political democracy -- examples, unfortunately, exist -- would be formless, windy, banal and utterly boring.

The Dyer's Hand

John Milton

[from John Milton's Paradise Lost Book 7]

. . . and in his hand
He took the golden Compasses, prepar'd
In Gods Eternal store, to circumscribe
This Universe, and all created things:
One foot he center'd, and the other turn'd
Round through the vast profunditie obscure,
And said, thus farr extend, thus farr thy bounds,
This be thy just Circumference, O World.

Jean Day

[from Jean Day's Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium, 2006]

from Ode in Pencil

. . .
               Last brief rays
in repetition's machine
set the scene [or Spiel]
on permanent sputter:
a woman entering
the frame of a murderous
cloud clobbers a man
ratcheting back
behind silent
credits (all clear
in underwear),
hogtied at the end
to the twang
of a player piano,
the small
unhappy voice of allegory
in snow scrub the blood
ponders longer than seconds
and spreading
out from its unrecoiled arrest
so you may see days raging,
as days rage
          Scratched out.
. . .

Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium (Adventures in Poetry)

Linda Gregerson

[from Linda Gregerson's Bright North, 2007]

Bright Shadow
      for Peter Davison

Wherever they come from whether the all-
                     but impenetrable bracken
                               on the nearer
                side of Maple Road (so closely does she bed

them down) or deeper in the wetland (each
                     new season surrendering further to
                               the strangle
                of purple loosestrife) they

have made for weeks a daybed of
                     the longer
                               grass beneath the net
                that sometimes of an evening marks

the compass of our shuttlecock
                     so Steven
                               when at last he finds
                an afternoon for mowing must purposely

chase them into the woods where she
                     so watchful
                               in the normal course of foraging but
                lulled or made a stranger to her own

first-order instinct for dis-
                     quietude (so firmly
                               have the scents and apparitions of
                this people-riddled bit of earth impressed

themselves upon the wax that stands for world-
                     as usual) (a scant
                               twelve months ago she was
                herself the sucking diligence that made

the mother stagger on the dew-drenched
                     lawn) will find them near the salt lick and
                               as by a subtle field-of-
                force will reel them back to

stations-of-the-daily-path that portion out
                     their wakefulness
                               (the ravaged
                rhododendrons bearing witness) forever en-

grafting the strictures of hunger (bright shoots)
                     to the strictures (bright
                               shadow) of praise.

Magnetic North

Lucie Brock-Broido

[from Lucie Brock-Broido's Trouble in Mind, 2004]

Leaflet on Wooing

Wanting is reposed and plump
As the hands of a Romanov child

Folded in the doeskin sashes of her lap,
Paused before the little war begins.

             This one will be guttural, this war.
How is it possible to still be startled

As I am by the oblong silhouette of the coiling
Index finger of a pending death.

No longer will
                         Wooing be the wondrous

Thing; instead, a homely domesticity, constant
As a field of early rye and yarrow-light.

What one is fit to stand is not what one is
Given, necessarily, and not this night.

Trouble in Mind

Ron Silliman & the National Book Award

Thanks, Ron Silliman, for throttling PoBiz, this time the latest nominating panel and nominations for the 2007 National Book Awards.

10/4/7 RealPoetik reading @ the Bowery Poetry Club

Niels Hav, Tao Lin, Elisa Gabbert, Carol Peters, Sampson Starkweather, and Sharon Dolin

Stanley Fish

[from Stanley Fish's How Milton Works, 2001]

In speech act theory (as originated by J. L. Austin) . . . a "declarative" [is] an utterance that brings into being the state it names, and does so by virtue of the unique authority of the speaker (when an umpire declares "You're out," you're out, but when a fan or fellow player says it, he succeeds only in expressing his opinion).

How Milton Works

Suzanne Langer

[via Jay Wright via Ange Mlinko in her recent book review in Poetry, October 2007]

Quoting Suzanne Langer in Elaine's Book (collected in Transfigurations), Wright lays claim to her insight: “and the triumph of empiricism is jeopardized by the surprising truth that our sense data are primarily symbols.”

Matthew Zapruder

[from Matthew Zapruder's The Pajamaist, 2006]

Andale Mono

Today I walked past my door in the rain
and put an old key
in a lock from which gold light shone.
Gold light through the keyhole like didactic
material below a painting glows to explain
the nineteenth century and other things we must know.
In the poem we want to try to set off a light each time
the door of the closet is closed. And to be
for the reader a mechanism attached to a string
the poem pulls. And piecing together
as desperately as we can. By fragments we mean
pieces of things we thought we have heard,
and when we say them mean though we cannot
see you we love you. By light we mean light.
Fear is a mechanism thinking too much
and not enough about the closet
holding something. The light in the closet
is on, the garments are thinking,
the door to the closet opens
into a long empty corridor we fear
for verily it like a torch
in the british sense through a dusty room
pervades us. When we are walking
with our torch meaning flashlight before us
reaching for the long poem inside us
one door explains how to read for both meaning
and pleasure. Another shuts.
The poem Andale Mono begins.
When I was a child I used to give speeches
into the mouth of the dishwasher open and gleaming.
When in a private language I said
ritual laughter mother and father
without knowing commit transmits
a kind of anger it understood,
though they were not.
Today I walked right past the face of a woman
I was sure was in Andale Mono.
Today I walked right past the poem
I knew and looked
into a lake which is now my wife.
My wife has entered the room. She is
a finger lake. In one hand she is holding
a sweater, pink, in the other a cream colored
spatula. Which one do you like best?
The poem is now my wife. For the first time
today in Andale Mono I drew my shoulders
back and looked straight forward and slightly
up. All day for the first time things were
true size. Droplets hung from my lashes
strobing at times the warehouse
next to the elevated, at others the brand-new
cathedral from which small people were streaming,
lugging large black musical instrument cases.
Large black chambers hold the delicate
wooden chambers for making chamber music.
In Andale Mono things are both breakable
and strong. In Andale Mono just out of reach
of my dangling hand the lock was a tiny door.

The Pajamaist

Carl Sandburg

[from Carl Sandburg: Poetry for Young People, Frances Schoonmaker Bolin, editor; thanks to David Wayne Hampton for pointing me at this poem]

Boxes and Bags
by Carl Sandburg

The bigger the box the more it holds.
Empty boxes hold the same as empty heads.
Enough small empty boxes thrown into a big empty box fill it full.
A half-empty box says, “Put more in.”
A big enough box could hold the world.
Elephants need big boxes to hold a dozen elephant handkerchiefs.
Fleas fold little handkerchiefs and fix them nice and neat in flea
    handkerchief boxes.
Bags lean against each other and boxes stand independent.
Boxes are square with corners unless round with circles.
Box can be piled on box till the whole works comes tumbling.
Pile box on box and the bottom box says, “If you will kindly take notice
    you will see it all rests on me.”
Pile box on box and the top one says, “Who falls farthest if or when we
    fall? I ask you.”
Box people go looking for boxes and bag people go looking for bags.

Poetry for Young People: Carl Sandburg (Poetry For Young People)

Susan Ludvigson

[from "Letters Back: God Responds to Emily Dickinson," the middle section of Susan Ludvigson's Trinity, 1994]

Consider how the moment enters itself
when you're not looking, scarcely
paying attention, imagination
trusting what comes
on the surrounding air, sweet
or cool, whatever wafts
through. Your whole body
participates, yet, as in dream,
hardly moves, nearly
paralyzed with pleasure.
How you are taken into and out of
yourself at once, language
a braid, unbraiding, so that
what the fairy tales call tresses
loosen in your hands, brushing
your eyes back to time,
that slow surprise.

. . .

To a new friend you write,
"To multiply the harbors
does not reduce the sea."
Why do you not find
the only harbor there is?
No, you're perverse, inclined
to let your words
scatter like bread
over the waters,
and then to think
they'll transform themselves
to inlets and coves
the heart of anyone
might row to.
No, I am not jealous.
I want, simply, for you
to be original and mine,
not turn to me late
as to any port.

Trinity: Poems

reading in New York

[from an editor of RealPoetik]

Next week, on October 4, Sharon Dolin - Tao Lin - Niels Hav - Elisa Gabbert - Sampson Starkweather - Carol Peters read for RealPoetik!!!

inspiration

[my friend Sally Rosenthal sent me this email]

If you haven't seen this farewell lecture by Randy Pausch, 46-year-old professor at Carnegie Mellon, i think you'll agree it's well worth the time to watch it. Randy is dying of pancreatic cancer - hard to fathom when you see how healthy he is. The talk is upbeat, with lots of humor, remarkable.

John Milton

[from John Milton's "Of Education"]

I deem it to be an old errour of universities not yet well recover'd from the Scholastick grosness of barbarous ages, that in stead of beginning with Arts most easie, and those be such as are most obvious to the sence, they present their young unmatriculated novices at first comming with the most intellective abstractions of Logick & metaphysicks: So that they having but newly left those Grammatick flats & shallows where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words with lamentable construction, and now on the sudden transported under another climat to be tost and turmoild with their unballasted wits in fadomles and unquiet deeps of controversie, do for the most part grow into hatred and contempt of learning, mockt and deluded all this while with ragged notions and babblements, while they expected worthy and delightfull knowledge . . .

B. T. Shaw

If you're into ducks (I am)
then you know about their mating
about which here is a great poem.

17th century musick

[from King's College London]

Jeremiah Clarke (1673?-1707) was himself a noted composer, best remembered today for his popular Trumpet Voluntary. He received his musical education at the Chapel Royal under John Blow and later became its organist, as well as Vicar Choral of St. Paul's. Found dead in his lodgings with a bullet in his brain, he was believed to have committed suicide as a result of a failed love affair. His death caused the poet Edward Ward, author of The London spy, to observe:

Let us not therefore wonder at his fall,
Since 'twas not so unnatural
For him who liv'd by Canon to expire by Ball.

Linda Annas Ferguson & Rick Mulkey

Please come to the Poetry Society of South Carolina meeting tonight, 7 PM, at the Second Presbyterian Church in Charleston to hear Linda Annas Ferguson and Rick Mulkey read from their new books.

Peter Sacks

[from Peter Sacks's "Milton: 'Lycidas'" in The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats, 1985]

What is the real significance and function of Saint Peter's opening words? I do not think that the purpose of his "How well could I have spard thee . . . Enough of such" has been adequately noted. He is making an equation, and it is important in the light of what follows to recognize this as the essential equation of the revenger. One Lycidas is worth enough of such, and it is against that number -- that tally -- that the entire speech unrolls like a single act of vengeance. Here is the controlled release of rage that we have seen to be so crucial to the work of mourning. Once again, it involves the locating of a target for a wrath that must be turned outward; the shifting of the burden of pain; the reversal from the passive suffering of hurt to the active causing of it; and above all, the assumption of the power to hurt, a power that we have studied in its relation to the totemic force associated with a metaphoric sexual immortality.

The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats

Theo Jansen

Theo Jansen

Grace Simpson

[from Grace Simpson's Dancing the Bones, 2001]

Trying on His Body

I dragged the cane-bottomed
wheelchair down from the attic
and sat, right arm dead,
hand curled shut.
I crammed my foot
into his built-up shoe
and braced against the footrest,
even screwed my mouth
like his. Not enough.
I had to go
to the high oak bed,
crawl into his hulled-out shape
and become a paralyzed father
begging for the urinal,
while the little girl patted her doll,
pretending not to hear — until
he turned his face away
and wept, and she did
that indecent thing:
grabbed the chipped
white pitcher and shoved it tight
between his naked legs,
not looking, while the shuddering
rush of pee splattered
the sheets and the loose
enamel handle wobbled
in her grip.

It all came back:
the sharp ammonia smell,
my red shame,
his hand on my head,
drawn mouth slurring
Bless you, Daughter.

Father, I still hear
those garbled words.
Now, after fifty years of need,
I accept your absolution.

Dancing the bones: Poems